I Wanted to Love This Movie

Rating: 5/10 (30 July 2013)

On paper it seemed like an interesting fit. Guillermo del Toro and an unusual premise of giant monsters attacking planet earth.
For people who appreciate his work, Guillermo del Toro is artistic, enthusiastic about film and enjoys getting great performances from his actors.
He was able to make Hellboy into something worthy of its own universe. It wasn't mainstream because it dealt with the darker themes of suicidal thoughts and feeling emotionally stunted. It was a film about feeling like midgets in a world of giants.
Then he followed that up with Pan's Labyrinth, yet another film that deals with the scary world of adults. Where monsters are real and pain is part of life. It ends sadly. Without easy answers. And he shows us even more fantastical creatures of our dark imagination.
In Pacific Rim, I did not feel the same sense of exploration. The same sense of being in a world created by a deep artist in search of human truth.
Pacific Rim invited the same themes he has explored in his most well-received works.

Dark Imagination - Escaping reality through adventure - A dangerous world

Notably missing are the same awesome artworks I've seen all the way in earlier films like Chronos, Mimic, Hellboy, Hellboy 2 and of course Pan's Labyrinth.
Largely gone are quirky designs from artist collaborators who seem to work from a deep well of twisted inspiration. Drawing on alien organic shapes merged with fairy tales and H.P. Lovecraft-esque sensibility.
Sure, it can be argued that employing his previous art styles may not have fit with this Japanese-inspired genre but for me its complete absence in this film made me miss the glee of design detail present in his previous art direction inspirations.
Before you dismiss this review as simply from someone who doesn't "get it"... let me be clear that: I Love Japanese Monster/Godzilla/Ultraman films.
Growing up, these were fun to watch and I loved pretending to be a monster or Ultraman fighting them and smashing buildings and terrorizing ant-sized humans in the process. I also love the Gundam series as well as classics like Tetsujin 28 (where a young boy controls a robot). In short, I have watched Japanese cartoons (anime) and have enjoyed the usual story structure of giant monsters needing to be defeated by giant defenses.
That said, this was not a movie that reminded me of the B-grade rubber suit world of make- believe I grew up watching. In those old TV shows, I was too young to care about the cardboard buildings or the cheesy explosions. But then again, I was less than 10 years old.
I cannot imagine a young audience getting the same amount of joy from Pacific Rim. In fact, the day I watched it, I didn't feel a sense of shared joy with the audience. They didn't feel transported back to a child-like state of imagining this amazingly epic world.
All I sensed was an audience watching an action movie with fast cuts and a blur of heavily edited images.
It's a shame for me. Since there have been movies with big scale action that still considers having memorable character trans-formative moments. The films that comes to mind include The Incredibles, Batman Begins, How to Train Your Dragon and the best moments of his own great movies like Hellboy.
What I do hope for is that Guillermo del Toro navigates his way back to making movies that remind you artistic vision is not a lost cause. And that keeping a human emotional center isn't boring.